Overview

During 1995 religious groups faced challenges in relating to one another and to government policies in various countries. Internally, many continued to grapple with the role of women in the ordained ministry and whether to accept certain sexual practices among adherents. It was a year of restructuring and leadership changes for some, and the impact of science on faith--and the uses of technology in its propagation--gained renewed attention. (For figures on adherents of all religions by continent and on adherents in the U.S., see below.)

In an encyclical in May titled Ut unum sint ("That They May Be One"), Pope John Paul II called for greater efforts to overcome the differences separating Roman Catholics from Orthodox Christians and Protestants while insisting that the office of the papacy had to remain the prime authority on the faith. A month later the pope joined with Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I in celebrating a liturgy at the Vatican and in describing the role of the papacy as one of service, not power.

In the interfaith sphere Vatican and Muslim officials announced in June the formation of a Joint Liaison Committee to explore their respective positions on religious and social issues. Earlier during the month the opening of a mosque in Rome was welcomed by the Vatican, and an official of the Holy See said it would be desirable for a Catholic church to be built in Saudi Arabia "as soon as possible." While the mosque made history on the European continent, what was described as the biggest Hindu temple in the Western world opened in the Neasden district of London. It was sponsored by the Swaminarayan sect, which was founded in the 19th century in the Indian province of Gujarat and had a strong following in London.

Britain’s religious diversity also was highlighted when Prince Charles declared in a television interview that if he became the sovereign he wanted to be known as "Defender of Faith" in general rather than accepting the traditional title of "Defender of the Faith," referring to that of the Church of England.

In the United States the Supreme Court broke new ground in a 5-4 ruling stating that the refusal of the University of Virginia to give money for a student Christian magazine while subsidizing other student publications was a violation of free-speech rights. The decision marked the first time that the high court had approved public money for a religious activity. While Justice David Souter said in a dissenting opinion that the decision violated the First Amendment’s establishment clause, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority that no public money would have gone directly to the periodical since the subsidy would have gone to an outside printer.

In another case the court ruled 7-2 that government must afford private religious speech as much public access as secular speech. It upheld the Ku Klux Klan’s right to erect a cross in front of the Ohio statehouse on the ground that the area had become a public forum.

In April a federal judge ruled in Oxford, Miss., that organized prayer in public schools is unconstitutional even if organized by students. During the same month, a broad national coalition of religious and legal groups issued a set of guidelines for accommodation of religion in the public schools. Pres. Bill Clinton and Secretary of Education Richard Riley drew on the document in issuing a similar one in August for the nation’s 15,000 public school districts.

The Internal Revenue Service revoked the tax-exempt status of the Church at Pierce Creek in Conklin, N.Y., because of ads the church had taken out in 1992 urging Christians not to vote for Clinton. The IRS action was believed to be the first of its kind taken against a local congregation. The General Council of the Assemblies of God found itself hit with a sexual discrimination lawsuit by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in response to an allegation that male employees of its headquarters in Springfield, Mo., who had engaged in extramarital affairs were disciplined more leniently than females.

The Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled in April that a $9 million punitive damages award against the mother church of the Christian Science faith was unconstitutional because it sought to force the church to give up its belief in spiritual healing. The 1993 decision, resulting from the death of an 11-year-old boy whose Christian Scientist mother refused to provide him with medical care, had been the first civil verdict against the church.

The Chinese government accused the Dalai Lama of breaking the rules of his own faith by proclaiming a six-year-old boy as the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama, the second most important monk in Tibetan Buddhism, claiming that this was done improperly. The government installed its own claimant in December.

In response to a decision by Lutheran Archbishop Janis Vanags to stop ordaining women because of the negative effect it had on relations with the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, the council of the Lutheran World Federation called on its 122 member churches to support female clergy, saying that "ordination should not become a bargaining tool" in relationships with other churches.

The General Synod of the 215,000-member Christian Reformed Church (CRC), meeting in Grand Rapids, Mich., gave district governing bodies the option of declaring the denomination’s male-only requirement for the offices of pastor and elder to be inoperative. That action led the 239,000-member Presbyterian Church in America to urge the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council to expel the CRC.

A survey of 4,900 clergy in 16 Protestant denominations conducted by Hartford (Conn.) Seminary found that the percentage of female clergy had declined over eight years in denominations that were once at the forefront of women’s ordination. The study found that only 11% of the clergy were female, despite a near doubling of female seminary enrollment since 1980.

Although the Vatican moved no closer toward the ordination of women in 1995, John Paul surprised many feminists when he issued a letter apologizing for Catholic involvement in policies that had relegated women to the margins of society. Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon was selected to chair the 20-member Vatican delegation to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in September; this made her the first woman to take the leadership role for the church at a major international gathering.

Conservative Rabbi Bea Wyler became Germany’s first female rabbi since the Holocaust when she was named in August to head two congregations in Lower Saxony state. The appointment was sharply criticized by Ignatz Bubis, an Orthodox Jew who headed the Central Conference of Jews in Germany and whose branch of Judaism did not recognize women rabbis.

The 36 archbishops of the Anglican Communion said in a pastoral letter in March that patterns of human sexuality by church members "at variance with the received Christian moral tradition" posed issues that "do not always admit of easy, instant answers." A study published in June by the Church of England’s Board for Social Responsibility said couples who lived together without marrying should not be viewed as "living in sin" and that the church should welcome single, married, separated, or cohabiting couples, in either heterosexual or homosexual relationships.

In the U.S. the 2.5 million-member Episcopal Church announced that retired bishop Walter C. Righter of Iowa would be put on a church trial for having knowingly ordained a noncelibate homosexual, Barry Stopfel, as a deacon in 1990. Righter denied having violated church law, and before the charges were brought against Righter, a five-bishop panel appointed by Presiding Bishop Edmond Browning ruled that "there is no provision of the Constitution or Canons of the church which prohibits the ordination of homosexuals." The Rev. Jeanne Audrey Powers, a prominent ecumenical leader in the United Methodist Church, became the highest-ranking official in the 8.6 million-member denomination to announce that she was gay. The church’s rules declared the practice of homosexuality incompatible with Christian teaching. Powers refused to say whether she was a practicing homosexual but said her July announcement was "an act of resistance to false teachings that have contributed to heresy and homophobia within the church itself."

After the 150th meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Atlanta, Ga., repented of its racist roots, the 15.6 million-member denomination approved a restructuring plan that was designed to reduce the number of its national agencies from 19 to 12 and that included its first-ever comprehensive mission statement. An ad hoc committee of U.S. Catholic bishops proposed several changes for the U.S. Catholic Church, including combining its two major national organizations into one and pressing for a more collegial relationship with the Vatican.

The Worldwide Church of God suffered losses of membership and income after a January sermon by Pastor General Joseph W. Tkach, Sr., in which he said that tithing and observing the sabbath on Saturday were no longer mandatory. Tkach, who succeeded church founder Herbert W. Armstrong, moved the group closer to Christian orthodoxy before he died in September. A drop in income led to cutbacks in the church’s headquarters staff in Pasadena, Calif., and in its magazine, The Plain Truth. More than 100 dissident clergy gathered in Indianapolis, Ind., in April to form a breakaway group called the United Church of God.

Nearly 200 leaders from a broad spectrum of religious faiths issued a statement in Washington, D.C., in May urging an end to the patenting of human and animal life forms for profit. Jeremy Rifkin, a biotechnology critic and organizer of the religious coalition, said the statement presaged "a great historical debate about to unfold between religion and commerce."

Australian physicist Paul Davies (see BIOGRAPHIES), who once wrote that science "offers a surer path to God than religion," won the $1 million Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1995. Davies, whose works include The Mind of God (1992), said when the award was announced that "I do not like to think of God as another object or another force at work in the universe. When I use the word ’god’ I use it probably rather in the same way Einstein used the word ’god’--to mean something which underpins this ordered universe."

Less than a year after assuming the presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 87-year-old Howard W. Hunter died in March (seeOBITUARIES). Other notable deaths in 1995 included Carl Mau, former general secretary of the Lutheran World Federation (seeOBITUARIES), and Patriarch Volodymyr of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The Rev. Nilson Fanini of Brazil (see BIOGRAPHIES) became president of the Baptist World Alliance, and the Rev. H. George Anderson, president of Luther College, Decorah, Iowa, was elected presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Archbishop Iakovos, who had led the Greek Orthodox Church in the Western Hemisphere since 1959, announced that he would retire in 1996.

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